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#YourCareer : 10 Performance Review Preparation Tips. Great REad for All!

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A performance review is an opportunity to showcase your contributions to your employer. In most cases, these meetings are held annually, but some companies hold more frequent, informal check-ins, often quarterly.

Preparation is vital to arm yourself with evidence of your performance and how it has benefited your employer, which will help you to enter the meeting with confidence.

1. Understand the purpose of your performance review.

It is natural to be nervous about your review. “For many people, especially earlier in their career, it can be really intimidating. I wish they felt more empowered,” says Allison Bertsch, head of talent acquisition and development at Aegon UK. You should understand the purpose is to help you do your best work and understand better how your contributions have helped or hurt your employer.

The review is meant to be a two-way conversation, in which you can identify areas for improvement, not simply a session where you are being passively and directly evaluated. “People shouldn’t feel like, going in, that someone is going to, akin to school, read me a report card and tell me all the ways I failed at all these different things,” says Ms. Bertsch. “We’re so used to our education system and our performance reviews shouldn’t feel like that.”

“Keep in mind that it’s your 45 minutes or hour with your manager to talk about where you think you’re doing things well, where you think you have some things you’d still like to learn and where you can improve,” she says.

2. Focus on specific contributions.

Try to think of things you have done that have had an impact on the employer that may not have been accomplished without your efforts. “The idea is to show how your contributions are unique to you and valuable for the company,” says Carol Cohen, senior vice president and global head of talent and transformation at professional-services company Cognizant. “Focus on your achievements that grew revenue, cut costs or transformed a process.” It can help if you keep a log of your achievements throughout the year that you can draw from to demonstrate your notable contributions. If you have been sharing status reports with your boss regularly, you may go back to them to pull significant items from.

3. Leverage co-worker feedback.

Regardless of whether your employer uses a peer—or 360-degree—performance evaluation system, the people you work with daily can be a great resource to help you understand your contributions. They can give you a sense of what impact you have had and where you might be able to improve. “Collect feedback from key stakeholders who can validate your successes,” says Mrs. Cohen. “Your case is always stronger when it’s delivered or reinforced by those with whom you’ve worked.”

 

“The idea is to show how your contributions are unique to you and valuable for the company.”

                                                                                                                                                                                            — Carol Cohen, Cognizant

4. What was expected of you?

If you set specific goals to achieve in your last performance review, now is a good time to review them. If you are a new employee, you might not have goals, but you should have a clear understanding of your responsibilities and what you are expected to do to achieve them. During your review, you should hit upon those items, including how you went about achieving them and, if possible, specific data points as evidence.

 

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5. Show how you have tried to improve yourself.

Some companies offer access to training programs and other ways to learn new skills. You should mention any training you have undertaken and explain how it helped you improve your performance. Your new skills may qualify you for new opportunities. You could use the review to discuss taking on new responsibilities. You could also initiate a conversation about your career goals and how you and your manager can work together to achieve them. This might be an initial conversation about an internal role change or promotion, or it could be a check-in about your progress toward achieving those goals, depending on what career stage you are in.

6. Show how you have adjusted to a challenging situation.

“If you began working remotely in 2020, use this opportunity to highlight your virtual accomplishments to show you didn’t skip a beat despite a change in your work environment,” says Mrs. Cohen. You can bring up some of the ways you adjusted to remote work and managed to remain productive. “Demonstrate how you collaborated effectively across global borders—and video screens—to get the job done,” says Mrs. Cohen.

7. Gather up your notes to produce a self-evaluation.

Once you have gone through the steps above, you may be expected to write a self-assessment before meeting with your manager. Even if your evaluation will only be an in-person meeting, it helps to have your notes organized and edited down to the most important points you want to get across. Be honest with yourself about what you think you could improve upon. Don’t be afraid to ask your manager for help.

8. Whatever your performance rating, don’t play defense.

When you meet with your manager, don’t approach the meeting feeling like you need to defend yourself or make excuses. You should be listening and taking in feedback that might seem negative at times. Explain that you understand these are things you can improve upon. If possible, come up with specific examples of how you would set out to achieve these improvements. If, for example, one criticism was that you often seem overwhelmed or disorganized, come up with a strategy to better manage your time and suggest some tools you plan to use to better track your work. If your manager says he or she doesn’t understand clearly enough what your progress is on projects, suggest providing more frequent status updates.

9. Think about areas of improvement for your next review.

Part of your review may include setting goals for the months and year ahead. You should have some ideas in mind for what you want to accomplish, which you can discuss with your supervisor. “Proactively draft goals for next year to position yourself as forward-thinking with a growth mindset,” says Mrs. Cohen. “Show you’re already planning to capitalize on this year’s efforts by contributing on an even larger scale next year.” She says that you can then fine-tune these goals in your performance evaluation by discussing how these may align with your boss’s plans.

10. Track your progress regularly to prepare for your next performance evaluation.

If you would like more feedback or support from your manager, you could also ask for more frequent check-ins. These sessions may help you to gain a better understanding of what is expected of you and give you more confidence doing your job. Your employer should aim to support you so you can make solid contributions in your role. Use this feedback and put it into action so you can achieve great results that can be shared in your next review.

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WSJ.com | January 8, 2021 | Anthony DeRosa

#Leadership : The Downsides Of Using #PersonalityTests For #Hiring … Personality isn’t Everything, and Companies Who Rely on It to Predict #Performance can Run into Trouble.

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Finding the perfect candidate for an open role is hard work. In a competitive market for talent, companies are not settling for a standard application and interview process. They’re coming up with oddball questions, devising strange vetting methods, and “auditioning” candidates before giving them a permanent offer. They’re also making them do personality tests.

The use of personality tests isn’t new. Executive coaches have used them, and so have career placement organizations, as Fast Company previously reported. However, recently, we’re seeing more companies sell “personality tests” as a recruitment method. SquarePeg, for example, asks job seekers and companies a series of questions on traits and preferences before referring them to each other based on their results.

Traitify sells its own personality assessments developed by psychologists, marketed as a faster and more effective option to the Myers-Briggs test. Talify connects college students with jobs that are supposedly the best fit with their skills and interests, which are assessed through a . . . personality test.

But just how effective are personality tests as a tool for hiring? Neel Doshi–coauthor of Primed to Perform, How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Motivation , tells Fast Company that while it can be effective, there is a lot of danger to the practice when organizations don’t use it effectively.

WHEN RESULTS HAMPER A “GROWTH” MIND-SET

The biggest problem with personality tests, Doshi says, is when companies weaponize them. That is–when the “results” of their test is used for justification on their progress (or lack of) at the company, whether it’s getting a promotion, being tasked with important assignments, or getting the green-light to lead an ambitious project. This kind of thinking discourages a “growth” mind-set among employees and implicitly encourages blame, leading to a toxic workplace environment. It can discourage employees from trying to improve and grow, and send a message that their “ability” to do something is static–rather than something they can hone over time.

As psychology professor Art Markman wrote in a previous Fast Company article–personality is a factor that can motivate people to act, but is not the only factor. Markman wrote, “A person who expresses a strong desire to take on a particular role is likely to learn new skills and habits that will allow them to succeed in that role, even if their personality characteristics would suggest they are not well-suited to that job. That internal motivation to succeed is often a stronger force than the motivation provided by personality characteristics.”

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THERE IS AN INCENTIVE FOR APPLICANTS TO “GAME” THE TEST

Doshi also notes that when you pose something as an assessment, there’s a very real possibility of applicants trying to “game” the test, which defeats the whole purpose in the first place. Because applicants believe that this is something they will be assessed on, they’ll be more likely to answer in a way that they think the company wants them to, rather than how they actually are.  “In a recruiting process, it’s not easy to get a truly accurate lead if the questions are part of an evaluation. You see time and time again where an organization will try to assess personality. The candidates tend to see it as tests, and they’re trying to figure out how to game the test,” Doshi tells Fast Company.

THE DANGER OF BIAS

Proponents of personality tests will argue that they’re using it to combat bias. After all, it’s just more data that they can use to predict an individual’s performance, right?  However, Doshi argues that in actuality, companies run the risk of bias when conducting personality tests for hiring, particularly in regards to diversity of thoughts. For starters, certain personality traits are not relevant to job performance. But if hiring managers believe that they are, they might miss out on talents who don’t fit the personality type, but whose skills, motivations, and other attributes bring a lot of value to the company.

This example is well illustrated in the technology industry. As Bloomberg journalist Emily Chang recounts in Brotopia: Breaking Up The Boy’s Club Of Silicon Valley, during the mid-1960s, the tech industry hired two psychologists, William Cannon and Dallis Perry, to determine what kind of individuals would make successful programmers. First, they concluded that such individuals needed to enjoy problem solving. Second, they concluded that good programmers “don’t like people.” Five and a half decades later, this stereotype continues to persist, even though product gaffes have shown, time and time again, of the dangers of not having emotionally intelligent developers who can understand their users’ concerns and point of view.

USING PERSONALITY TEST AS A MOTIVATIONAL TOOL

Doshi believes that personality tests are best used as a “motivational” tool rather than a hiring tool. That is, once a candidate is hired, the personality test should be a way to have “safe conversations about your natural preferences at work.” Rather than trying to determine whether one is an introvert or an extrovert, the “test” should ask questions like, What part of your job do you find painful?

Businesses often jump to personality tests because it seems like a silver bullet, Doshi tells Fast Company. It seems easy and alluring to boil someone down to four factors–but when a company hasn’t taken the time to think about what they actually need to create a high-performance culture, they can end up running into more problems than benefits.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anisa is the Editorial Assistant for Fast Company’s Leadership section. She covers everything from personal development, entrepreneurship and the future of work.

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FastCompany.com | February 23, 2018 | BY ANISA PURBASARI HORTON 4 MINUTE READ

Your #Career : Five Annual-Review Mistakes You’re Probably Making…Performance Reviews Shouldn’t Be One Awkward Conversation every December. Here are the Common Missteps to Avoid.

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Companies like Accenture, Microsoft, and General Electric are ditching annual performance reviews for more frequent feedback sessions, but for many others the practice is a way to end the year with a keen plan for the future.

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The key to doing it successfully is not confusing performance evaluation with performance management, says Christine M. Riordan, president of Adelphi University and leadership development expert.

“Typically, organizations ask that performance be formally evaluated once a year,” she says. “A performance evaluation form commonly assesses the accomplishments, strengths, weaknesses, and development needs of an employee.”

Performance management, on the other hand, is a continuous process of assessing and developing the performance of an individual to align with the strategic goals of an organization, Riordan continues. “It is a constant process of discussion on progress towards goals and how the employee is performing,” she says.

A year-end review, then, should be different than periodic check-ins. Sit down with your employees, and make the most of the meeting by avoiding these five common mistakes:

MISTAKE #1: EVALUATING TRAITS INSTEAD OF BEHAVIORS AND RESULTS

One of the most common mistakes is evaluating personal traits, such as leadership, motivation, conscientiousness, and attitude, according to the American Management Association (AMA).

The problem with traits is that they are internal and subjective— almost impossible to evaluate on a fair basis, according to the AMA.

Instead, year-end reviews should focus on behaviors and results. Behaviors are actions that you can observe directly, such as completing tasks. Results are also observable, such as achieving a sales quota or increasing revenue by a certain percentage.

MISTAKE #2: BEING TOO LENIENT WITH YOUR FEEDBACK

Performance evaluation can be uncomfortable for most people -– both for those giving it and those receiving it, says Riordan. “Because of the discomfort, when there is a performance problem, managers will often avoid difficult conversations or be too vague in the evaluation,” she says. “Because managers often don’t want people to feel bad, they may rate everyone the same or just use the more favorable ratings on the scale.”

Giving everyone the same score or only favorable scores can become a norm and create problems for the organization in terms of differentiating among employees for raises or dealing with performance problems particularly when an employee has been rated average or higher, says Riordan. Avoid this mistake by being firm on your ratings, understanding that the foundation of your company depends on it.

 

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MISTAKE #3: WAITING UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAR TO GIVE ANY FEEDBACK

The secret to effective year-end reviews is laying the groundwork throughout the year, says Elissa Tucker, principal human capital management research lead at American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), a nonprofit human resources research organization.

This includes clearly defining performance goals, measures, and rating criteria; scheduling frequent check-in meetings to update performance goals, discuss progress, and address challenges; collecting feedback and performance examples on an ongoing basis; and having informal conversations with employees daily or as often as possible to recognize small accomplishments and open the door for low-stakes questions and coaching.

APQC’s 2016 People Challenges at Work Poll found that the top-two challenges people have with their managers are:

  1. Does not share enough information
  2. Does not provide enough direction

“These findings show that managers would benefit from making communication a New Year’s resolution,” says Tucker. “The end-of-year performance review is the perfect time for managers to get a jump start. Then, they can follow through by having regular – weekly, monthly, or quarterly – meetings with each employee.”

The annual review should not be a shock, adds Bonnie Hagemann, CEO of Executive Development Associates, a talent management and research firm. “It should be a documentation of an ongoing conversation that has been happening between the manager and the employee all year. If the time ever comes that a manager needs to fire an employee, the employee should not be surprised because he or she had many opportunities and support to get the situation turned around.”

MISTAKE #4: ACTING LIKE A JUDGE INSTEAD OF A COACH

When providing feedback, it is helpful for a manager to think and act like a coach, says MaryAnne Hyland, professor of human resource management at the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business in Long Island, N.Y.
“The ultimate goal of the performance review is to improve employee performance, and managers are more likely to get the results they are hoping for by focusing on how to improve, rather than being punitive,” she says. “While many employees do not like constructive feedback, giving specific recommendations on how they could improve their performance is likely to be better received than more general comments about needing to improve.”

Focus on the behavior, not the person, adds Hyland adds. “For example, it is better to say, ‘The accuracy of the line items on your budget proposals needs improvement,’ rather than, ‘You are bad at budget proposals,’” she says.

If employee have performed poorly, good managers investigate. People don’t perform poorly without a reason, according to the AMA. There are always causes, and it’s a manager’s job to make finding those reasons part of the review process.

MISTAKE #5: NOT BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN YOUR RATING PROCESS

The performance review process should be transparent and well documented. A study done at the London School of Economics and Political Science published in the Spring 2016 issue of Academy of Management Discoveriesfound a good degree of consistency in the weight individual judges assigned to different factors from one appraisal to another. When asked to rank factors by importance, however, answers often varied, with most mangers having difficulty explaining their approach to others.

“Although participants adopted a consistent judgment policy across different performance-appraisal situations, they showed little insight into their own judgment policy,” write study coauthors Hayley German of the London School of Economics and Political Science, Marion Fortin of the University of Toulouse and Daniel Read of Warwick Business School.

“The fact that experienced administrators differ sharply in how they evaluate the fairness of the same appraisal suggests why this can be a potential minefield for employers. On the basis of our findings, it comes as no great surprise that annual performance appraisals have been losing favor.”

 

FastCompany.com | STEPHANIE VOZZA | 12.16.16 5:54 AM

 

Your #Career : Want To Nail Your 2016 Performance Review? Show You’re Versatile…Doubling Down on your Specialized Knowledge Might Not Pay Off Like it Used To.

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With only two months left in 2016, performance review season is officially upon us. As many of us know all too well, it can be an awkward experience. But one key to nailing your review this year may be a departure from conventional wisdom. Typically we’re told to make a strong case for how well we’ve performed in our particular roles—show you’ve mastered the job skills required of you and delivered great results, and now you’re ready to move on to bigger challenges.

Interview2

And it’s not that that’s bad advice. But as the workforce evolves, the value of a broad-based skill set may be rising. Your employer might not even be totally aware of the shift, but they’re more likely to need jacks-of-all-trades than they did even a year ago. Here’s a look at why, and how to play into that trend during your next review.

THE RISING VALUE OF VERSATILITY

“I guess you can look at me and say that I didn’t specialize in anything,” UX designer Amanda Yarmolich reflected recently. “But a lot of times, it ends up being more valuable to have somebody who can kind of pick up whatever you need.”

 

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Yarmolich isn’t alone in that sentiment. According to the 2017 salary guide published earlier this month in the design magazine HOW, employers will gladly pay top dollar, “but they expect value, which comes in the form of worker versatility.” And that may not just be a quirk of design-focused industries. Yarmolich works for the insurance marketplace eHealth. In her recent experience, “You just have to be ready to do whatever needs doing at the drop of a hat.”

How come? For one thing, the changing macroeconomic landscape is pushing more employers toward low-labor business models—in other words, to find ways of getting more value out of fewer people. That necessity may have first gripped recruiters amid the last financial crisis, but since the recovery since then has been so incremental, it’s seeped into many employers’ hiring mentalities.

As one staffing expert told Fast Company earlier this year, “We’re seeing more cross-pollination among industries than ever before,” which is not only expanding what counts as “transferrable skills,” it’s also requiring workers to be more comfortable tackling a greater range of tasks—including unfamiliar ones. That type of agility is becoming less of an added bonus and more of a basic prerequisite for many job openings in a widening variety of fields.

On the other hand, employers have always prized versatile workers. In his 1957 book The Problems of Design, famed industrial designer George Nelson observed that employers have long sought “general flexibility in relation to almost any situation. Translated into action, this means an ability to bring a high level of detached perception to any problem, and this has a very special kind of value to management.”

The difference now is the change from management preference to economic imperative. Corporate boards seem to understand this value, judging from the kinds of people they put in the corner office. The New York Times recently reported that the quickest path to CEO these days is a circuitous one—often via several functional areas—according to new research suggesting that a mix of skills may now count more than simply long experience in one specialty.

COMBINATORIAL CREATIVITY

These utility players are what coauthors Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin describe as “neo-generalists” in their new book The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go Is Who You Are. They use the term to describe knowledge workers who excel in “combinatorial creativity.” As Mikkelsen described it to me, “Neo-generalists are people who expand their craft by bringing in knowledge from disparate areas and creating new ideas and methods from those new combinations.”

Martin added that knowledge workers everywhere often feel their organization or industry is too siloed, but he believes it’s the type of worker that makes this true or untrue: “We are arguing that people who have a more neo-generalist mind-set make a difference because they deliberately step outside of those silos.”

Hiring managers may be wising up to this idea. Not only are versatile workers often more cost effective, they also bring silo-busting behaviors to companies that help organizations stay innovative over time. What may have started as a dollar-stretching measure often turns out to be a competitive advantage.

HOW TO BE THE NEO-GENERALIST YOUR BOSS IS LOOKING FOR

According to Martin, “Everybody has the potential to be a neo-generalist—absolutely everybody. But it’s a question of being willing to accept that learning is never done, that you’re never a finished article, always beta.”

 

FastCompany.com |  LISA BAIRD  | 10.31.16 5:00 AM

#Leadership : 7 Ways To Re-Think Performance Management…The Following 7 Topics are Fundamental when Re-Thinking any Performance Management Process & Culture.

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The concept of Performance Management sounds simple, but of course it isn’t. Humans have a lust for control and have developed quite a few mental concepts to ‘control’ performance management; processes, ratings, manuals, competency frameworks, forms, collective labor agreements, etc. While all these things once had a purpose, the sum of it is not fit for duty 16 years into the 20th century.

Free- Project Sticky Notes

People connecting and leaving each other valuable feedback to improve the way you work? That will drive performance.

The following seven topics are fundamental when re-thinking any performance management process and culture.

1. Workforce Alignment is fundamental

Aligning the employees to the right set of objectives remains the success factor. Showing employees thepurpose of the company and what is expected of him/her is the most important factor in performance management.

Without workforce alignment, any performance management process – annually or instantly – has no frame of reference and is entirely useless.

If your mission and strategy is sound and your workforce is connected and engaged, then all they need is real time meaningful feedback, peer coaching and mentoring.

Ask yourself: How is goal alignment incorporated in your new Performance Management process?

 

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2. Feedback is magic

Feedback is essential for people to connect and learn from each other. The better people can exchange feedback, the stronger their network and its outcomes in terms of collaboration and cooperation. This feedback needs to be constructive and authentic to become meaningful and instrumental in animating teams and corporate culture.

And it needs to be real-time! Why? Well if there is one thing our multitasking social media world is messing with, it’s our ability to remember. If I make mistakes helping out a client, then immediate feedback is needed. Not 11 months later in my performance review. You have to make hay when the sun shines! This has nothing to do with generations Y (Millennials) or Z (iGeneration). It’s the world turning faster.

Ask yourself: How have you integrated real time, continuous, open feedback in Performance Management?

3. Space for mistakes is crucial

Everybody knows that people learn from mistakes. That’s how children grow up and how we evolve as a species. But how many performance management processes allow employees to make mistakes? They are often constructed to do the opposite. Employees covering up mistakes, because their sole focus of the performance management meeting is to get a salary increase. And managers are breaking their minds on how they should apply the mandatory forced rankings. Both are not helping to create an environment for healthy mistakes.

Ask yourself: How do you allow people to make errors and learn?

4. From judging to mentoring

Too many performance conversations are one way traffic where the manager is ‘judging’ the employee. Stop managing. Start leading. Don’t tell employees what to do. Involve them, explain things to them and demonstrate how it’s done. Not annually, but constantly and empathically.

Coaching and mentoring programs are often separated from the performance management process. While rethinking the performance management process it’s worth to rethink a tighter integration between them. Coaching and mentoring are the real-time components that drive the effectiveness and productivity of teams. A crucial component of performance.
Ask yourself: How are protégé, coach and mentor relationships incorporated in your new performance process?

5. Time to rethink performance vs compensation

This might be the biggest paradigm shift for organizations, their work councils and the trade unions. Let’s rethink the way that performance and compensation are connected. Yes, money can stimulate performance, but it remains an extrinsic motivation. It’s theintrinsic motivation that deserves more attention, because that is what really motivatesus in a deeper and sustainable way.

And if it’s the intrinsic motivation we need, then we can ask ourselves to what extend we can decouple the compensation from the performance ‘cycle’, without losing a performance culture.

Why not decouple remuneration from tenure and yearly performance cycles and move towards compensation based on certain gigs, projects and/or roles that are performed by the employee? Trusting people to do their job and only act if they don’t. And then coach them to better performances and keep on giving them other challenging gigs. Preferably even connected to customer satisfaction ratings.

The biggest naysayers are usually work councils and trade unions, responsible for complex collective labor agreements, that have the lion’s share in HR’s attention span. The focus should be on creating an open, authentic and constructive feedback culture. Only such a culture will enable the company to progress and that will be the most significant contribution to employee happiness and engagement, which ultimately drives revenue. A disrupted bankrupt company pays no compensation at all.

Ask yourself: How is customer satisfaction connected to compensation?

6. Time to rethink the purpose of ratings

If you don’t pay based on performance ratings, do you then still need them? Well… ratings have a purpose on its own. Ratings can drive performance, but also the opposite.

There are studies that show big benefits of using ratings in a competitive way, utilizing the competitive nature of people and driving performance in that way. Other studies show reverse results; using ratings in the wrong way can also demotivate people.

It ultimately comes down to thinking carefully about what you like to rate and why. And in which way to create transparency in those ratings. If you measure rating, you better do it right, otherwise it will backfire on your ultimate goal: increasing performance.

Ask yourself: How are performance ratings contributing to a performance culture?

7. Performance of contractors needs to be managed too

Teams deliver results, not individuals. This aspect is often addressed with a team target that is rarely motivating the individuals of a team to step up their game. What’s really needed is a collaboration platform where the entire team can monitor its own performance. Where they can instantly give feedback to each other to steer the team in the right direction.

The rise of the freelancer is adding a layer of complexity. This group of contractors is growing exponentially (globally), but are often excluded from performance management, because presenting contractors with a yearly performance form is like asking Kanye West to spend a year in a silent monastery.

Presenting a yearly form is not the goal . Improving performance is the goal. If you want to manage the performance of the entire team, then flex workers are part of it and the ability to share instant feedback should go beyond employees on the payroll.

The ‘simple’ compensation model of freelancers is an blueprint of how we can deal with compensating performance as discussed earlier (point 5). Free lancers have a job for which they get paid. They receive feedback and gain experience to improve their skill set, which they use to take on other gigs, for which they get paid a different compensation.

Ask yourself: How is your new performance model supporting team output including contractors?

Where to go from here?

A new performance management ‘system’ can only be applied in a new paradigm. I do not believe that you can have a hierarchical management structure/culture and then move to team based feedback. This would be a step back from traditional performance rating as most of us have today.

There is no way around it: to be successful you have to animate the culture, management style and attitude that propels performance management to the next level.

This story originally appeared on the SAP Business Trends community.

Forbes.com | June 29, 2016 | By Patrick Willer, Workforce Innovation Consultant, SAP

 

#Strategy : How to Stop Getting Distracted at Work … In order to Function Effectively, some Focus & Awareness are Needed

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Sometimes it’s difficult to focus at work. If you’ve been consumed by anxious thoughts concerning a stressfullife event, or the general busyness at the office keeps pulling you away from your assignments, you’ll need to figure out how to achieve order so you can get your work done.

Free- Work Computer & Supplies

“Learning how to rein in your thoughts and focus is going to help you achieve your goals in life. Without focus, you can never achieve anything. If you know how to align your thoughts and devote complete concentration to the task at hand, you can realize anything you aspire to in life,” said Eric Phillips in the book Focus.

 Here’s how to stay focused so you can accomplish your work goals.

1. Close your office door

If you have an office, don’t be shy about closing your door from time to time. It’s nice to try to create a welcoming environment by allowing your team members to come in and talk, but sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and get down to business. This means that you’ll need to enter “do not disturb” mode every now and then. Push aside your guilt and remember that by taking time to focus on your work, you are helping your company move forward. Release yourself from the mindset that you need to be available 24 hours a day. Time management expert Craig Jarrow explained it this way:

Why would you want your senior leaders being constantly interrupted while they are doing some of the company’s most important work? An open-door policy should mean that you have the right to walk in my office, that I am approachable, not that the door has to always be physically open. People should know that a closed door means, ‘work in progress.’ If they have an emergency, they can knock on the door and interrupt. Lower priorities can be taken elsewhere or wait until a more appropriate time. It is about setting expectations. Set expectations that the door will be open when you are available. Perhaps, even set ‘office hours’ as to when you will be available for conversation.

2. Retrain yourself

Part of the reason you get distracted at work is that you’re accustomed to allowing yourself to give in to the distraction. The key to pushing past this hurdle is to commit to breaking this bad habit. Establish a schedule and stick to it, create a to-do list, or resolve to arrive to work earlier so you can avoid common office distractions. Whatever you decide to do, give your absolute best effort.

“The basic things we all want—fulfilling relationships, accomplishments of which we’re proud, meaningful success at work, to be of service to others, peace of mind—are surprisingly straightforward to achieve. But, in many cases, our best efforts to achieve them are built on habits and behaviors that, simply put, don’t work,” said Peter Bregman in Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Stop Counter-Productive Habits and Get the Results You Want.

 

3. Stop being a busybody

If you’re constantly leaving your desk, how do you expect to get any work done? If you are often getting up to reheat your coffee, chat with co-workers, or take multiple snack breaks, you are the problem. There’s really no mystery there. Try to sit still for at least 30 minutes so you can make some progress on an assignment.

4. Don’t obsessively check messages

Reserve a specific time for checking messages. Constantly checking social media, phone, and email messages throughout the day will keep pulling you away from your work. Instead, reserve part of your lunch break or some time after work for checking messages.

“In our current-day lives, [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][we] obsess over being liked, respected, appreciated, and even celebrated. This need plus dopamine equals a happy high. You know that feeling you get when you check Facebook and 15 people have liked your post? That’s because you’re wired to be liked. You’re wired to enjoy it when this is affirmed to you. Ultimately, you’re wired to think that this sort of outside approval is essential for survival,” said Naomi Goodlet in Distraction Hacker: Make Space in Your Life for the Things (and People) That Truly Matter.

5. Avoid office troublemakers

Do your best not to engage co-workers who tend to steer you away from your work game. As long as you stay away from the gossips, the lazies, and the ones who can’t stop talking, you’ll be able to get some work done. Don’t be afraid to confront someone who is distracting you.

“The best way to deal with this is to deal with it. Perhaps you need some coaching, perhaps you can do it on your own, but you need to be able to set boundaries in the workplace, otherwise there is just dysfunction. In the end, freeing yourself from distractions is a personal responsibility. Yes, the number and variety of distractions is large and growing, but that’s no excuse. In order to function effectively, some focus and awareness are needed,”said Steve Adam, founder and president of Adamlabs.

Follow Sheiresa on Twitter and Facebook.

 

Cheatsheet.com | November 27  | 

http://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/how-to-stop-getting-distracted-at-work.html/?a=viewall

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#Strategy : A New Drug could Enhance your Performance at Work — and One Doctor Says the Side Effects Aren’t any Worse than Too much Coffee

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If you Could Take a Pill that Will Make you Better at your Job, with Few or No Negative Consequences, Would you Do it?   In a meta-analysis recently published in European Neuropsychopharmacology, researchers from the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School concluded that a Drug called Modafinil, which is typically used to treat sleep disorders, is a cognitive enhancer. Essentially, it can help normal people think better.

Out of all cognitive processes, modafinil was found to improve decision-making and planning the most in the 24 studies the authors reviewed.  Some of the studies also showed gains in flexible thinking, combining information, or coping with novelty. The drug didn’t seem to influence creativity either way.

“What emerged was that the longer and the more complex the task, … the more consistently modafinil showed cognitive benefits,” said Anna-Katharine Brem, a neuropsychologist at Oxford and one of the paper’s authors, in an email.

Surprisingly, the authors found no safety concerns in the data, though they caution that most of the studies were done in controlled environments and only looked at the effects of a single dose.

Modafinil is one of an arsenal of drugs, which includes Adderall, Ritalin, and Concerta, that are increasingly used “off-label” by college students and adults seeking greater productivity. Just 1.5% of adults aged 26 to 34 were taking ADHD medications in 2008, but that number had almost doubled to 2.8% in 2013, as FiveThirtyEight points out.

Though these drugs treat real medical conditions — ADHD, in Adderall’s case; narcolepsy, in modafinil’s — many of the people who take them don’t have those conditions.

Adderall and modafinil are different chemically, but their effects on cognition are similar, according to some psychiatrists. Adderall, or amphetamine, works by boosting the brain’s levels of norepinephrine and dopamine, two chemicals that are responsible for concentration and alertness.

Alex Dodd/flickrAdderall.

Scientists are less sure how modafinil works. One pathway is by stimulating the release of histamine, which produces a sensation of wakefulness. (People with allergies may be familiar with histamine because many allergy drugs are antihistamines. Just as Benadryl dampens histamine and puts you to sleep, modafinil boosts it and wakes you up.) But modafinil also works on other neurotransmitter systems in the brain, and the resulting effect is one of allowing users to perform complex cognitive tasks more effectively.

These drugs can have negative health consequences, especially at large doses. The number of ER visits associated with the nonmedical use of stimulants among young adults tripled between 2005 and 2011, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Some research has shown that the long-term use of modafinil can affect sleep patterns. In rare cases and at high doses, stimulants like Adderall have been shown to induce psychosis.

 

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Still, some psychiatrists say the health risks of cognitive enhancers are overstated. Millions of adults take these drugs. Not all of them have ADHD or sleep disorders. And yet, investment bankers and corporate lawyers aren’t dropping dead at their desks.

Very few adults “are going to have a horrible effect from using these medicines,” James McGough, a clinical psychiatrist at UCLA, told me. “They’re safe.”

The side effects, he says, are no worse than having one too many coffees — jitteriness and stomach aches. According to him, people taking Adderall or modafinil at therapeutic doses don’t get addicted, in the sense that stopping their use doesn’t cause a painful withdrawal.

Adderall and modafinil are about equal when it comes to both their performance-enhancing capacity and side effects, McGough told me. Ruairidh Battleday, one of the authors of the modafinil paper, said the side effects and abuse potential of amphetamine seem worse to him than those of modafinil.

The paper hints at a coming debate over the ethics of smart drugs. Currently, people require psychiatric diagnoses in order to be prescribed any of these pills. But if these medicines are ultimately found to be safe, and they work for almost everyone, should anyone be able to take them?

And if modafinil does become more widespread, where does it end? Will we soon be locked in a productivity arms race, pumping out late-night memos with one hand while Googling for the latest smart-drug advancement with the other?

Some sports organizations, for what it’s worth, already ban the use of these drugs without an ADHD diagnosis for the same reasons they ban steroids and other performance enhancers. Will employer drug tests soon screen for off-label modafinil use? Or, on the contrary, will CEOs welcome the rise of extra-sharp workers who never need sleep?

These are not hypothetical questions. Between technological enhancers like holographic computers and pharmacological ones like modafinil, more and more products are coming to market that will give well heeled, busy consumers the means to become even more so. As Battleday says, “more agents for neuro-enhancement are undoubtedly on their way.”

Little is known about the long-term risks of pharmaceutical nootropics. What’s more, cognitive enhancement falls beyond the scope of medicine. The FDA doesn’t prioritize approving drugs for healthy people who want to become superheroes. Similarly, doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe medication to people who aren’t sick.

“It’s cheating, by our current standards,” McGough says.

But if white-collar workers are pounding spreadsheets for 16 hours a day — as they reportedly are at companies like Amazon — those standards are bound to be questioned sooner rather than later.

Read the original article on The Atlantic. Check out The Atlantic’s Facebook, newsletters and feeds. Copyright 2015. Follow The Atlantic on Twitter.

  • Businessinsider.com | August 2015 | Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

http://www.businessinsider.com/modafinil-could-enhance-your-performance-at-work-2015-8#ixzz3kIPcYGWl

#Leadership : How to “Ripple” Your Leadership…As a #Leader Tasked with Seizing New Ground & Improving an Organization’s #Performance, Do you Start with the Systems, the People, or Yourself? Get Out the Mirror!

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Leaders Cannot be Effective If they Don’t Begin by Understanding their Own Values, Visioning their Personal Futures, & Recognizing their Unique Strengths & Weaknesses.

As a leader tasked with seizing new ground and improving an organization’s performance, do you start with the systems, the people, or yourself?  Get out the mirror!

According to leadership expert, Chris Hutchinson, leaders cannot be effective if they don’t begin by understanding their own values, visioning their personal futures, and recognizing their unique strengths and weaknesses.

leadership-role-pic

In his new book, Ripple: A Field Manual for Leadership That Works, Hutchinson demonstrates that true leadership is like skipping stones in a pond. With an engaging conversational tone and fun, whiteboard-style sketches, he teaches that the secret to leadership is that the power isn’t in the stone. It’s in the ripples. And stone-throwers simply can’t set robust, long-lasting ripples in motion if they’re not starting from a place of self-alignment.

To get into alignment Hutchinson recommends three steps.

  1. Decide What Matters Most

Leaders who consciously and explicitly state their own values lead from a place of clarity and empathy.  On the other hand, leaders who direct without such self-awareness tend to be defensive and oblivious to others’ motivations and values.

To reveal what matters most to you, write down your top ten values. Now underline the top three. Finally, write out your understanding of how you are living (or not) those three values, including in your role as organizational leader. Adjust your course as necessary.

 

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  1. Chart Your Own Course

According to Hutchinson, the clarity of the end goal increases the clarity of the actions needed to achieve it. And nowhere is that more true than for leaders’ personal visions for their own lives.

In his workshops, Hutchinson takes participants through a guided visualization. He tells them to close their eyes and picture their own memorial services three years from now. Then he asks: Who’s attending the service? What do you want those people to remember and say about you? What do you want those people to carry on as your legacy?

Now ask yourself: How do I get from my reality of today to my hoped-for future? Start taking daily steps to get there.

  1. Know Where You’re Awesome

Are you often surprised or disappointed when others in your organization can’t do (or see) the things you do? This is a sign that you don’t know your own strengths, says Hutchinson. “When people unthinkingly see the abilities that come easily to them as not important or valuable, they are not recognizing—or even discrediting— their own strengths,” he writes.

On the other hand, he adds, any strength overdone or used without thought can become a weakness. In other words, more is not always better.

To discover your sweet spot, Hutchinson advises making a list of things you find easy and fun. Circle or add anything that people often compliment you on. Validate by asking someone you trust to look at this list of strengths to see if they agree. Of course, third-party assessments such as DISC, Strengths Finder, and Workplace Motivators can also help you see and understand where you’re awesome.

Truly effective organizational leadership starts with self-leadership, emphasizes Hutchinson. Next comes leadership of people and last, systems. While Ripple: A Field Manual for Leadership That Workscovers all three, it makes a strong case for working on yourself first to make the biggest impact on your organization.

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Kevin Kruse is the creator of the Leading for Employee Engagement eLearning program for managers and author of the bestselling book, Employee Engagement 2.0.

 

Forbes.com | August 7, 2015 | Kevin Kruse